Fæ wrote: >On 5 August 2014 11:33, Gryllida <[email protected]> wrote: >>WMF Engineering is currently composed of individual teams as documented >>at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering . These teams >>look after the software that faces us everyday, and often work together. >> >> Could we please have some more people (potentially a dedicated >>‘community’ team) who could do these things: >> - encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/ about the next features >>they'd like, >> - run programming and documentation activities requested (or started) >>by community [there would be a lot of small projects, unlike the big >>ones the current Teams are working on], >> - encourage localising documentation for, and centralising the location >>of, all community-developed programming work, >> - raise awareness of community development efforts across all Wikimedia >>projects, >> - actively encourage members of community become MediaWiki and Gadgets >>hackers in the Free Software philosophy? >> >> This would be, in my view, a relatively small, collaboration-type team >>(with just half a handful of people for timezone coverage for IRC >>support). >> >> Open to brainstorming and suggestions. I would compile thoughts into a >>wiki page afterwards to continue thinking on the idea. > >The roles you describe seem to have a lot of overlap with what we >might expect WMF volunteer coordinators / WMF community liaison >employees to be busy with.
Theoretical overlap, perhaps. People in the role of "Community Liaison, Product Development and Strategic Change Management", a title Orwell would be proud of, are not doing what's being described in this e-mail. The current community liaisons are really paid advocates and they're tasked with shilling bad products. This isn't the fault of the people in these roles, many of whom I know and respect, but we should be honest that their role is much closer to that of a marketer or public relations person. Substantive, meaningful communication between the people building software and the people using software is the goal, but the current implementation dramatically fails, as a number of software projects from the past two years have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate. And of course there are separate "community advocacy" and "engineering community" teams. The Wikimedia Foundation staff is heavily bloated and I very much doubt that hiring additional staff will improve matters. Gryllida's proposal has merit, but implementing it probably requires more than a small team. Part of the issue is that thousands of editors' views are discounted in favor of the latest hare-brained ideas from Wikimedia Foundation middle management. And while many of these ideas can be, and eventually are, killed or mitigated, it's draining work that's likely more easily accomplished with a larger pool of focused energy. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
